


An Ordinary Girl

by shaggydogstail



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Hogwarts Letters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-03
Updated: 2017-02-03
Packaged: 2018-09-21 20:52:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9565922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shaggydogstail/pseuds/shaggydogstail
Summary: The ten year old Lily Evans was a perfectly normal little girl, with an only slightly peculiar collection of dolls. And that business with the tortoise wasn't her fault at all.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for femgenficathon on LJ, prior to Deathly Hallows, and no longer canon-compliant.
> 
> Thanks to javajunkie13 for the beta job.

Lily Evans, aged 10 ¾, was a perfectly ordinary little girl. She lived in a terraced house with her mother, Rose Evans, her father, Gerald Evans, and her sister, Petunia Evans. The Evanses had a pet tortoise named Gonzalez, a collection of ornamental plates in the kitchen, and a battered old VW Beatle that they kept parked at a rather alarming angle hanging off the kerb in front of their house. Lily’s mother worked part-time at the local technical college, teaching psychology to sixth-formers, her father was a Civil Servant, and her sister was a pain.

Lily liked sherbet dib-dabs, ponies and science (she was top of her class at St Oswin’s, the tiny Church of England school just a few streets away), was fond of dancing and owned a small collection of Sindy dolls. The dolls were a little unusual, as they all had brilliant red hair, the exact shade of Lily’s own; none of her friends’ dolls had hair just that colour and Rose Evans was _sure_ their hair wasn’t that shade when she bought them. Still, Lily did like to keep her dolls on the bedroom window sill—perhaps the sun had bleached the colours.

Lily did _not_ like her sister Petunia very much at all. Petunia was three years older than Lily and lorded it over her younger sister something terrible. Petunia had golden blonde hair which reached half-way down her back and which she would beg their mother to spend hours arranging into ringlets with the curling tong. Lily thought Petunia was stuck up and vain; Petunia said that Lily’s freckles looked like squashed warts and called her ‘carrot top’ which always made Lily hopping mad because carrots have _green_ tops, stupid. When Petunia came away from a particularly nasty catfight with Lily with green streaks in her hair, she swore it was the spiteful little _freak_ ’s fault, but their father said that was ridiculous and their mother reminded her that she wasn’t too old for a spanking. Petunia was sent to bed without any dinner and nursing a grudge.

Mr and Mrs Evans were at a loss to explain exactly _what_ had happened to their eldest daughter’s hair, but they knew it couldn’t be Lily’s fault. That would be ridiculous.

It wasn’t Lily’s fault when Gonzalez the tortoise developed, well… _stripes_ on his shell, the very same day that Lily was heard complaining that a tortoise was an awfully boring pet, and couldn’t they get something a bit more exciting, like a tiger? If four different vets couldn’t work out how it happened, how was a little girl to know?

The Evans’ were a perfectly normal family, at least by the standards of the North London suburb in which they lived, the sort of area that would later be known as the ‘muesli belt’ on account of all the aging ex-hippies dangling wind chimes over their window boxes and demanding the sale of no less than four different varieties of lentils at the little shop on the corner. They were a liberal family and therefore patient of Lily’s eccentricities—a little too patient if you asked Granny Evans, who was always scandalised on her annual visits to her son’s home by the little girl’s peculiar ways and precocious outspokenness, returning to Dublin muttering dark predictions about how the child needed to be straightened out under her breath.

Petunia didn’t think the family were all that normal at all, complaining loudly about their mother’s flowing skirts and Dad’s sandals. Lily once overheard their parents saying that Petunia had developed ‘airs and graces’ since she’d fallen in with a snotty group of girls at secondary school, which Lily wasted no time in repeating to Petunia. Petunia merely sniffed and looked at Lily as though she were the stupidest creature alive, and said she didn’t expect someone as young as Lily to understand. She always did that when she didn’t want to argue with Lily, but she wouldn’t be able to get away with it for much longer. Lily was nearly eleven, and there was no arguing that that was practically grown-up.

Lily’s eleventh birthday fell on a Sunday, and on Saturday afternoon her parents arranged a party in the back garden. There were balloons and streamers, games of pin the tail on the donkey, and ice-cream with strawberry jelly. (Though Rose Evans could have _sworn_ she’d been forced to buy orange jelly because there was none of her daughter’s favourite strawberry in the shop.) Some of the girls from down the street laughed at Lily for having a silly, little kid’s party, but Lily just scowled at them and tripped them up with a dainty foot during musical statues.

On Sunday Lily opened presents and cards from her family, and was too excited by her new Lovely Lively Sindy, with her moving elbows, knees, hips and waist to notice the strange-looking letter that her mother slipped into her pocket, looking straight ahead and smiling brightly.

There was another letter the following day, but Lily was running late for school and in a sulk because Petunia had called her new doll ‘stupid’ so she didn’t notice that either.

She did notice the owl sitting on the top of the car as she left for school on Tuesday morning, and fed it half a cheese sandwich from her lunchbox.

By Wednesday the Evans’ were nervous and twitchy, jumping at the sound of the front door. Lily saw her father rip something up before he put it in the pile for recycling, muttering that it ‘just wasn’t funny anymore,’ and looking more cross than he had since the time Lily had accidentally set fire to the t-shirt Petunia had refused to lend her.

On Thursday Lily managed to get her hands on the letter when it dropped, not through the letterbox, but through the kitchen window. She just had time to read her own name on the front before her mother snatched it away. Lily tried to argue, but her mother said that the letter was just a silly joke, and Lily wasn’t to look at it.

Lily supposed it was one of those chain letters that Miss Brown had told them about at school and warned them all not to pass them on. Lily knew that sending chain letters was very naughty, but she still wished that her mother would let her read it, because she didn’t get letters of her own very often. She wasn’t _stupid_ after all, and knew better than to think that some terrible fate would befall her if she didn’t pass a letter on. Lily walked to school in a towering temper, stepping on every single crack in the pavement on the way, just to prove that she wasn’t superstitious.

On Friday there were no letters at all. Oh, well, that was the end of that.

Petunia and Lily were bickering over the washing-up from breakfast on Saturday when a stern-looking old lady in an old-fashioned dress knocked at the door and asked to speak to Mr and Mrs Evans, please. Rose Evans made her two daughters wait in the kitchen while she and her husband entertained the visitor, exchanging maddeningly mysterious looks as they ushered her into the living room.

Lily tried listening at the door for a while, holding up a glass to magnify the sound as she’d seen on TV once, but she still couldn’t hear much over the low hum of adults making conversation. After about five minutes she gave up, deciding it was probably just boring grown-ups talk anyway, and went back to constructing a tropical island for her Sindy dolls out of an old cat litter tray and the green sacks Dad used for tidying up garden waste. She’d finished the palm trees and was just starting work on the deck chairs, when Petunia came storming in, complaining that Lily had stolen her hair grips to decorate the trees. (Well, they _did_ have little ornamental parrots on them—just right for a tropical island.) The ensuing fight resulted in water spilt all over the floor, a tear to the hem of Lily’s dress and the parrot snapped clean off one of Petunia’s hair slides.

‘I hate you!’ shrieked Lily, stamping her foot as she raged at her sister. ‘You always ruin _everything_!’

‘Oh, shut up, carrots,’ retorted Petunia.

‘DON’T CALL ME CARROTS!’

There had been voices raised, to a lesser extent, in the next room, where Mr and Mrs Evans were feverishly debating the future of their youngest daughter’s education with their peculiar visitor. All of that stopped as soon as they heard the fighting from the kitchen and, just as Petunia was attempting to grab Lily in a headlock, the door burst open. Rose Evans had her mouth open to shout at the two girls to shut up and I-don’t-care-who-started-it, but she stopped dead, stunned into silence when she stepped on a carrot.

They were hard to avoid: the entire room was ankle-deep in carrots which, in addition to carpeting the floor, covered every available surface—the worktops, the kitchen table, even the sink was overflowing with carrots. The greater quantity surrounded Petunia who, judging by the tufts of leaf and fragments of broken root-vegetable in her hair, had suffered them raining down upon her head.

‘Well,’ said Professor McGonagall as she surveyed the scene with a hint of a smile twitching her thin lips. ‘I think this settles the question of young Lily’s magical ability. Unless, perhaps, you were expecting an unusually hungry troupe of rabbits for dinner?’

The assembled Evans family turned and stared at her in horror.

~*~

Lily could scarcely sleep that night: she sat up well after she ought to have been asleep, discussing the day’s extraordinary events with her Sindys in an animated whisper.

_I’m a witch!_ she thought delightedly as she played with the dolls’ hair. _I can do magic! And I’m going to go to a special school to learn how to cast spells and make potions and, and…ride a broomstick._

Lily wriggled beneath her blankets, unable to believe her good fortune. She couldn’t understand why her mum had cried or why her dad looked so stiff and tense: with any luck, she’d be able to fix the car with magic, as the hours he spent tinkering with it at weekends never seemed to get it running for long.

Petunia had actually fainted, which Lily thought was the funniest thing she’d ever seen. She was very glad that she wasn’t going to have to go to Riverside Comp with Petunia after all, as the thought of having to walk to school with her sister lecturing her and making fun of her in front of her friends, and then ignoring her at break, had made the prospect of Big School far more frightening than the enormous building or the hordes of other pupils had ever seemed.

_In fact_ , thought Lily as sleep finally overtook her some time after midnight, _I won’t even have to see stupid Petunia at all except for holidays._ It was a very happy thought.

~*~

Lily’s fevered excitement stayed with her during the coming months, and intensified more than ever when she received another letter, delivered by a tawny owl, listing all the books and equipment she would need for school. Professor McGonagall called again to escort Lily and her parents to a place called Diagon Alley to purchase supplies. (Petunia refused point-blank to accompany them, and had been sulking heavily ever since their mother had told her she ought to be excited for Lily.)

Rose and Gerald were gobsmacked by the moving books, strange animals and even stranger patrons in the shops in Diagon Alley, but Lily took it all in her stride, cheerfully bombarding Professor McGonagall with an endless stream of questions about magic, and Hogwarts, and what’s that funny-looking man over there doing? Her parents offered to buy her a pet from the Magical Menagerie, to keep her company when she was so far from home, but after careful consideration Lily declined, deciding instead to take her favourite Sindy with her.

On the morning of September the first, Lily bid farewell to her parents next to a wall between platforms nine and ten at King’s Cross Station. The nice man who was apparently ‘from the Ministry’ told Lily and a small handful of other new students that their families wouldn’t be able to get through the barrier onto the special platform where the Hogwarts Express awaited them. Lily was slightly sceptical that it was really possible to run straight through a brick wall even if you were magical, but since the other children all looked a bit pale and scared, she decided she’d have to go first, and ran through onto the platform at full-pelt, her mother’s goodbyes and be-goods ringing in her ears.

The train journey was pleasant, but uneventful, though Lily was very taken with the chocolate frog she purchased from the tea-trolley. The boat trip across the lake was rather more the sort of excitement that Lily had been hoping for, as the strange, enormous man with the bushy beard and funny accent warned them all to be careful of falling in, because there was a Giant Squid in the lake.

Lily gasped out loud when she saw the castle come into view between the trees—tall turrets pointed to the evening sky and a hundred windows shone light out through the darkness. It looked like something from a fairytale. _Oh, Petunia would be so jealous._

Her Sorting took a matter of moments, which was just as well as Lily felt her first flicker of nerves as she sat on the tiny three-legged stool with the battered old Hat rifling through her mind and the eyes of a thousand other children trained upon her.

‘GRYFFINDOR!’ yelled the Hat, and Lily leapt up to a chorus of tumultuous applause from the Gryffindor table. As Lily handed the Hat back to Professor McGonagall she could have sworn that the elderly witch _winked_ at her, but a moment later McGonagall’s face was as stern as ever, and Lily decided that she must have imagined it.

Still, Lily was fantastically happy, caught up in the excitement of the Sorting Feast, so she marched over to the Gryffindor table, eagerly taking the space a couple of older girls had made for her with a broad grin on her face.

_I don’t know what Mum and Dad were so worried about_ , Lily thought as she shook hands with her new housemates. _I’m going to be just fine_.


End file.
